Barge-in
Barge-in lets a caller interrupt while a voice agent or IVR is still speaking, and makes the system stop and respond to what the caller said.
Without barge-in, a caller has to wait for a prompt to finish before the system listens. With it, the system keeps listening while it talks; when it detects the caller speaking, it stops its own audio, takes in the interruption and replies to it.
Doing this well is harder than it sounds. The system has to tell a real interruption apart from a short “mm-hm”, background noise or its own voice echoing back on the line, and it has to stop fast enough that the caller does not talk over it for long.
VocalStack Voice has barge-in built in, so a team building an agent on it does not write the interruption handling themselves.
